How to disable user registration in Joomla

This guide will explain how to disable user registration in the dashboard for Joomla based sites. Since Joomla version 3.4 user registration has been disabled by default, but for sites set up before this version was released you may need to manually disable user registration within the Joomla dashboard.

This will often be required to avoid problems with spam user registration and attempts to exploit the user registration process to send spam email.

Let’s get started…

Disabling User Registration

1. Login to the Joomla dashboard for your site. This is usually accessed by adding /administrator/ to the end of the site URL e.g. www.yourdomain.com/administrator/ then entering the admin username and password for the site.
2. Select the System menu and open the menu for Global Configuration.
3. Select the Users menu from the left column of the page.
4. Set the preference for Allow user registration to No and select the Save button.
5. If you need to delete any spam user registrations from the site, go to the Users menu from the navigation bar at the top of the page and click Manage. Select the check-box alongside each username that you need to delete and select the delete button to apply this. Make sure not to delete the admin or superuser accounts.

That’s it, user registration should now be disabled for your Joomla site.